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SaaS Customer Bill of Rights: right thing, right time

By | October 12, 2009, 2:42pm PDT

Summary: AG Customer Bill of Rights - SaaS - Live I’m not pimping this because Ray Wang and I happen to be collaborators or that I got a credit in the Altimeter Group report but because Ray and Jeremiah Owyang’s SaaS Customer Bill of Rights is the right thing at the right time. It is complementary [...]

AG Customer Bill of Rights - SaaS - Live I’m not pimping this because Ray Wang and I happen to be collaborators or that I got a credit in the Altimeter Group report but because Ray and Jeremiah Owyang’s SaaS Customer Bill of Rights is the right thing at the right time.

It is complementary and additive to Phil Wainewright’s earlier work on this topic from the vendor position and comes just at a time when Microsoft is taking a battering for the Sidekick fiasco while Phil is documenting still more ‘amateur’ dramatics:

As I’ve often written in the past, big, established companies frequently over-estimate their competence at cloud computing and SaaS, simply because they fail to realize it’s far more than just a repackaging of what they already do. Unfortunately, their inability to grasp the emerging as-a-service business model and the demands of cloud-scale computing leave them performing like amateurs. The pity of it is, their arrogance and incompetence undermines trust in all cloud computing providers, even those that take their responsibilities seriously.

I could say exactly the same thing about slack attention to access controls in the SME SaaS space where today it really is the Wild West for open APIs. That’s more a lack of maturity in thinking though something that needs to be addressed more generally.

As an aside, I’ve seen plenty of people poo-poo’ing SAP’s as yet anemic cloud efforts with Business ByDesign. Given recent events and what both Phil and Ray are saying: would anyone prefer they didn’t do more work before unleashing the marketing machine? They are after all the archetypal legacy player trying to figure out SaaS.  Just sayin’…

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Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991.

Disclosure

Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett is committed to maintaining the independent and opinionated stance that his writings are well known for and does not enter into contracts that would limit his freedom of expression in any way. However it is important in the interests of full disclosure to inform readers of those relationships so they can form their own judgment. This page therefore lists all Dennis Howlett’s current business relationships.

Dennis’s consulting arrangements occasionally bring him into direct or indirect business relationships with some of the companies about which he writes, and/or their competitors. Where such a relationship exists, it is disclosed at the end of any article that references the company concerned.

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Except as mentioned above, Dennis has no other investments in any tech industry participants. This page last updated 23rd February, 2010.

Biography

Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991 in a variety of European trade and professional journals including CFO Magazine, The Economist and Information Week. Today, apart from being a full time blogger on innovation for professional services organisations, he is a founding member of Enterprise Irregulars and an investor in a European start-up. Prior to, Dennis was technology and tax partner in a British firm of Chartered Accountants for 10 years. Prior to that held various senior finance roles across a broad range of industries.

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